A review by pearl35
The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World by Dan Ackerman

3.0

Good tech history, intertwining the development of video games, consoles games (and the GameBoy) with the decline of the Soviet Union and the bizarre bureaucratic machinations of the Russian Academy of Science and the state's technology and business negotiating arm. As multiple agents descended on Moscow, contracts in hand and lawyers in tow, the game itself, which had been passed hand to hand through Soviet to Hungarian computer programmers, was already being released in the West as a Cold War oddity. Meanwhile, psychology researchers were realizing that Tetris' easy to learn rules of play and absorbing nature could be used to study the ways in which the brain rewires itself to work efficiently, and to form memories (not to mention the addictive power of gaming).